Squidoo Gives Blogs A New Way To Be Seen

Demonstration: The Friday Traffic Report “Lens” by Jack Humphrey. This service really does a nice job of exposing your blog to new audiences. Very unique way of social bookmarking and tagging.

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Using Product Giveaways As A List Building Tactic

These days one of the most powerful ways to build your opt in list is to use co-registration and product giveaways. This is a great way to build your list fast and uses other leverage techniques that can save you time and money.

However, there are some disadvantages to using these techniques.

1 - The person signing up for your list is also signing up for someone else’s who is most likely in direct competition with you. Keep in mind that when they are sending out information on products and services, you will probably be doing the same thing and giving your list member the same email twice and a reason to unsubscribe.

One way around this is to always send out unique emails so that they never get the same email twice. This is especially true in internet marketing.

2 - By promoting products as an affiliate you will more than likely be sending your members or site visitors to a squeeze page. This is where they will enter their email information and join the list of the person whose product you are promoting.

Now this is great if you get a commission, but even so, after you get this commission you will no longer have this person as a customer. However, the affiliate product owner now has this persons email to continue to promote to thanks to you.

A good way to avoid this is to offer your site visitors a free e-book or report in relation to the product you are promoting. This way they are sent to your squeeze page first and you get the email as well. Then you simply promote the affiliate link within the report you are giving away or in your auto responder.

Yes, you will have a similar situation as mentioned in the first scenario, but the email you obtain will be much more targeted and the member will now know you.

3 - The last item to mention is giveaway products. Many authors will allow you to give away their e-books freely to your website visitors and list members. The drawback here is the contents of the e-book.

There is nothing wrong with having the authors name, URL and company information within the e-book. After all they did write it. The thing is many authors now have complete opt in forms or require that you register to gain access to the complete e-book. This will also be redirecting possible subscribers to your list.

Try a variation of #2 and have them opt in to your list before giving them the download link. There are also programs available that allow you to giveaway the e-book with your product or opt in details as a back end offer.

You can also bundle several related e-books and offer them as a reward for signing up for your list.

Try to get resale rights as well. This may allow you to re-brand the e-book with your opt in information. This way the author gets credit and you can still get the subscriber.

Using co registration and product giveaways are a two way street. The key is to try and get the visitors email as well as give them a valuable tool or service.

List building is largely about building relationships. What better way to start than to give them something of value? Just make sure that you get something valuable in return. When it comes to marketing online, what’s more valuable than your subscribers?

Tags: list, list builder, list building, marketing, website promotion

Wikis, Vlogging, and Podcasting

Perhaps you’ve heard about blogs - the hottest communication story of last year. Commentators from Newsweek to the Wall Street Journal, from CNN to PBS have devoted time to the phenomenon. Blogs are just one of the new technologies that are changing the way politicians communicate with voters and businesses communicate with customers.

For marketers, these changes mean more direct interaction with customers and potential customers. By speaking and listening directly with the customer marketers are able to reduce the expense for public relations and advertising. Of course, these developments are worrying some in the pr and advertising industries, as well as the news media.

Many things about marketing communication won’t change, of course: you still need to have something to say. And the best way to apply all these technologies is still within a business niche. With that said, here are some of the other ways communication is changing:

1. Podcasting is the hottest idea on the internet. Starting in 2004, people began downloading homebrewed radio shows to their iPods. So instead of “broadcasts” they’re “podcasts”. Unlike streaming audio, podcasts require the file to be downloaded. The advantage of podcasts versus streaming is that you can take it with you when you’re not on the net. The disadvantage is that streaming audio is much easier for a customer to play at his or her computer. The solution is to do both - create an audio file for streaming, and an mp3 for podcasting. The same recording can be used for both.

2. A vlog is a video blog. Unlike podcasting, vlogging can refer to either streaming video or downloadable shows. Combined with the rapid development of internet video delivery, vlogging seems poised to take off. As with audio, you can prepare your video file in both streaming and downloadable formats. Also like audio, you can begin with very low-cost tools and work your way up to full blown professional equipment. Remember that people like good production quality, but they like watching something interesting even more.

3. Wikis are websites that are editable by the site users. Content becomes part of a dialogue among the users, instead of something fixed. This interaction can build strong communities, and produce large sites with enormous information. Up until recently, wikis have been difficult to use, and limited to techs. New approaches to wikis are making them easier to use, and reinforcing the next trend:

4. Social software. Community sites that encourage sharing and conversation are springing up in many areas. Photography and music have been drivers of this trend, in addition to political activism. Interaction builds community, and community is where the market is.

5. Almost all of these tools involve RSS, a technology for feeding information to people who want it. Unlike email, which is “pushed” by the sender, rss feeds have to be “pulled” by the user. While still not completely mainstream, rss is a rapidly growing delivery system.

For the small marketer, the price of reaching customers directly has dropped. Large corporations, though, are picking up on these technologies rapidly. To truly gain an edge, the small business person needs to develop a strategy for these channels before the big companies figure them out.

Tags: blogging, podcasting, video blogging, vlog, vlogging, wiki

Great article on finding content for your site…

This is a two-part article.  I will try to locate the second half if possible, but this was so good I decided to run it here on the FTR.

There really are a lot more ways to build good content into a site than most people think.

Robin has done a great job getting some great ideas for quality content together!

—

25 Ways to Add Quality Content to Your Web Site (Part 1)
. . . Using ideas that cover at least 25 different industries!
By Robin Nobles  (c) 2006

We’ve known for a long time that quality matters to Google. In a
post Senior Google Engineer Matt Cutts made to his blog
(http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-press-day-2006/), “quality”
was mentioned several times as being important to Google. Quality
matters when it comes to content, and it matters when it comes to
links.

However, building content and links doesn’t have to be painful.
Web site owners tend to think of content in a very limited way.

So, let’s open up our creative minds and think of all sorts of
ways of adding quality content to a Web site.

A few things to remember:

• You’re only confined by the boundaries you set for yourself and
  your Web site. Allow yourself to think in a totally different way
  than you’ve thought before.
• Your Web site content should be written for your buying
  customers . . . not for you. Your Web site content should not be
  written for the search engines. The search engines are not your
  target audience.
• Think of the overall picture of your site, as if it were a
  living, breathing entity. After all, Web sites should continue to
  grow on a constant basis and never be stale or stagnant.

Let’s Get into the Fun Stuff: Quality Content for Your Target
Audience

1. A calendar of events. This is ideal for sites like real estate
sites to show upcoming open houses; book stores to promote
upcoming book signings or writers’ meetings; collectors’ sites to
show meetings across the country, etc. Be sure to allow visitors
to send in their own event to be posted to the calendar.

2. Maps. Consider real estate sites, hunting or fishing sites,
camping sites, hotels, or any outdoor recreational sites for
maps. Be sure to add content at the bottom of the map that
describes the map and outlines its purpose as it relates to your
site.

3. Before/after experiences. This is perfect for products or
services you’re selling where customers can write in and discuss
how this particular product or service helped them. These could
turn out to be mini articles, or use them as testimonials.

4. Pictures from your customers. You could set up a special place
where past customers could post their pictures and journal
entries on your site. This is ideal for vacation sites,
recreational sites, wedding sites, baby sites, photography
studios, etc. How could you use this idea on a Halloween site? On
a flower site?

5. Online coloring sheets. Use your imagination here. If you set
up some coloring sheets about your vacation property, kids could
color those sheets and post them online before their trip in
their own special online area. After the trip, their parents
could post pictures and a journal of their trip. This is their
“Web site” about their trip, all hosted on your site as a perk
for booking through your vacation site. What are they going to do
with this information? They’re going to tell their friends,
Grandma and Grandpa, Aunt Edna, etc. They’re going to link to it.
You can use this perk as part of your USP (Unique Selling
Proposition) when differentiating yourself from your competition.
You’ll be building one-way links from your past customers, plus
visibility for future customers. Win/win situation. You’ll think
of many ways of adding coloring sheets (or similar creative
activities for kids) to your site, if your site is the type that
would work for kids.

6. Blogs or forums certainly add fresh content to a site.

7. Articles or new pages of interest to your target audience.
Write new content on a regular basis – once or twice a week
should be your goal.

8. An expert Q&A on the main page of your site. Get an expert to
answer questions, and post one question/answer a week (or a day –
whatever you can handle) on the main page of your site. Have past
Q&A’s in a searchable archive on your site.

9. Product reviews. If your industry has products or software to
review, consider writing candid reviews of those products.
Publish the reviews on your Web site as well as publish them in a
few of the online publications. Readers are always interested in
totally candid reviews, where the writer lists the positive as
well as the negative aspects of a product. If you have a
landscaping business, how could you use this idea? What products
do you, as an expert, prefer to use, and why?

10. Short tips. If your product or service lends itself to short
tips, write up a series and publish them on your Web site. Send
them out in your newsletter. Get your readers to send in tips as
they use the product. Offer a discount off additional products if
they submit tips.

11. FAQ’s. FAQ’s are content – content that your target audience
wants to know. As you get questions from your readers, add
additional Q&A’s to your FAQ’s to keep them current.

12. How-to guides. People love “how to” guides. If you sell
online plumbing parts, why not have a “how to” guide on
installing a new toilet? Make it easy on your customers, and
they’ll come back to you again and again. Create a series of “how
to” guides. Be The Toilet Guy on the Net. May not sound too
glamorous, but if you’re highly visible on the Net and are
converting traffic to sales, you can afford to be glamorous OFF
the Net!

(Continued in Part 2)

Robin Nobles conducts live SEO workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com) in locations across North
America. She also teaches online SEO training (http://www.onlinewebtraining.com). Localized SEO training is now
being offered through the Search Engine Academy. (http://www.searchengineacademy.com)  Sign up for SEO tips of the
day at mailto:seo-tip@aweber.com.

Copyright 2006 Robin Nobles. All rights reserved.
 

Tags: content, content strategies, Virtual Publishing Empires, vre, website content

VisitorVille Provides A Cool Way To View Your Stats!

I just checked out VisitorVille.  If you are tired of looking at the log files or boring stats programs that come with your hosting to tell what pages are most popular and other information about your visitors, Visitorville should perk you up!

It turns your visitor log files into a Simms version of your website. 

You have to see it to see what I mean.  This has got to be the coolest way to view the traffic on your site!

Oh - if you want to get it, I can save you 10%.  Just put this special code in the coupon code area:  ftrvv

Check out VisitorVille!

Tags: stat tracking, stats, tracking, visitor tracking, visitorville, website promotion, website stats

Marketing on Social Bookmarking Sites

When Tag and Ping was released, the potential to destroy or at least disrupt a perfectly clean environment (social bookmarking sites) was born.

Now, I promote Tag and Ping as an incredible marketing tool and have been calling the social bookmarking phenomenon “Social Power Linking” for awhile.

The potential for great, new targeted traffic streams is massive.  And proven, now that marketers other than me have seen the results of participating in social bookmarking sites first hand.

But with every new marketing tool or system that actually works and is very powerful in the right hands, there is always a caution:  respect the tools and the communities they help you reach out to with your information!

The key to success with social bookmarking and tagging is caring and ethics.

Spamming places like jots.com and digg.com will not work.  You will get flamed, buried, and loyal readers of such sites will despise you.

Search engines WILL enact a no follow rule by the end of this year as a result of people spamming the many social bookmarking hubs, there is no question about this.

So just spamming to get links on high ranking pages will be a moot point.

The most important point is that interacting with and playing by the rules set by the blogoshpere when it comes to tagging will bring you vast rewards over spamming the directories with links having no clear intention of respecting the community in which those links show up.

Philip Nicholson, a writer for 4webresults.com, writes this about social bookmarking: 

“What’s going to make advertising to social networks effective is to engage the audience, and the audience will be engaged by targeted advertising and interactivity.”

That certainly is true for places like Digg.com.  Post something well thought out and you will get some action on your site and at Digg.com itself as readers “digg” your story and check out your site for more information.

Conversely, if you mess with that community and post cruddy content or irrelevant content, they will literally bury you from showing up on any pages of significance on their network.

Google only WISHES it had the same power of human edited content! 

If you want to learn more about social bookmarking for marketers, check out my Tag and Ping post and grab a free audio podcast with me interviewing Sean Wu, the author of Tag and Ping. 

Tags: blogging, blogs, bookmarking, promotion, social, social bookmarking, tagandping, tagging

Free Links and Search Engine Submissions

I have updated the Free Non Reciprocal Link and Search Engine Submissions page with new resources for website promotion fanatics.

Should be easier to get to the important free resource posts in The Friday Traffic Report now that all of the free traffic and listing resources are in one place.

I will keep updating the Free page with more resources as we get them put together.

Free Links and Search Engine Submissions

Tags: article submission, article syndication, linking, links, non reciprocal links, search engine submission

Internet Marketing Basics

The Friday Traffic Report has a significant number of beginner marketers and people who are thinking about doing something great with a business on the web, but just cannot understand where or how to start.

There are umpteen courses on the net dedicated to beginner internet marketing training.  Most are very poorly done or contain amateur information dressed up to look like expert info.

One course, InternetMarketingBasics101 by Chris Morin, (Armand Morin’s brother) stands out above most others.

I have little time to put together beginner internet marketing courses.  It is not a topic that interests me anymore.

I kind of stay out on the edge and write for people who have been marketing for awhile. 

But when subscribers write and ask about beginner courses, something to get their feet wet and that doesn’t talk over their heads, I point them to quality courses like  InternetMarketingBasics101.

It starts from the very beginning and really takes you by the hand to show you exactly the information you need when starting out on the web as a prospective internet marketer and webmaster.

From web design, hosting, and graphics to picking killer product ideas and affiliate programs, InternetMarketingBasics101 gets you through the first hurdles every beginning internet marketer faces.

InternetMarketingBasics101 gets me out of having to create a course for beginner internet marketers and I am happy to recommend it as a solid resource for anyone just starting out with an internet business.

Course Details:

5 hours of audio training on basic internet webmaster skills and internet marketing tactics.

Experience Level:  Complete Beginners

Tags: beginner internet marketing, internet marketing, internet marketing course, jacks reviews, marketing product reviews, newbie, training

Video Syndication

Google got into the game of video syndication first.

Now Yahoo has launched and upgraded their video syndication service.

When these guys go to war, it benefits all of us!

Why you should create and syndicate video:

• It is a marketing method seen as very difficult and advanced by your competition
• Most people won’t take the time, preferring to continue marketing via proven methods like RSS and article syndication, no matter how tough the competition is for their niche.
• The harder something seems, the fewer people who take advantage of it.  i.e. LESS COMPETITION!
• Video is instantly respected (done properly) far above written and audio content.  (Again because only a handful use it as a lead generator.)

How to learn about creating and syndicating high quality video with cheap tools…

One place is Content Propulsion Lab.  Here you can find screen capture software and other tools to create how-to videos that you can upload to Google, Yahoo, and other services like YouTube.com.

 

Tags: Content Syndication, video, video production, video syndication

Finally! A Digg for Marketing Content!

Just found a killer resource (in the making).  They are new, but picking up steam it seems.

Have you ever been to Digg and wished there was something like that for marketers who produce marketing content?

Now you have a place to submit your stories!

It’s called Marktd and it is all marketing related content all the time.

Chalk another killer find up to The Friday Traffic Report!

Tags: Content Syndication

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